Featured Database

This digital archive is sourced from two microfilm collections: American Fiction, 1774-1910, which contains works taken directly from Lyle H. Wright’s American Fiction: A Contribution Towards a Bibliography, and post-1900 works from the Library of Congress Shelf List of American Adult Fiction. The Wright bibliography, one of the most comprehensive in existence, contains more than 15,000 titles that comprise some two million pages. For works originating from the period 1911-1920, this collection is based on the Geoffrey D. Smith bibliography and sourced from the William Charvat collection of American Fiction at the Ohio State University, which comprises nearly three-quarters of all adult fiction published in the U.S. These works reveal much about the socioeconomic, political, and religious tenor as America became a distinctly 20th-century nation.